This being Autodesk University week on the CAD calendar, a flurry of press releases is being issued, as is common during such events. One issued by Toni Cole of Edelman (Autodesk's new external PR firm), however, puzzled me:
MapGuide Open Source and Autodesk Mark Record Downloads in First Year
The headline tells me that MapGuide downloads broke some sort of record during the first year as open source software.
The record MapGuide would have to beat is that of another product's first year downloads. The body of the press release, however, makes no further mention of the record. Statistics are provided, but they are not compared to any other time period (vs another first year) nor another product (vs Autodesk or MapGuide competitors or open source products):
The MapGuide Open Source community currently numbers over 600 members, and the source code has been downloaded more than 23,000 times. Additionally, the FDO source code has been downloaded 3000 times.
The language of the headline reminds me of events that call themselves "1st Annual" -- you can't have an annual event that's never occurred before. And you can't proclaim a record that's compared to nothing.
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